China's diverse censors

Attempts to rein in
microblogs like Sina Weibo are a huge part of China's sophisticated information control strategy
these days. However, news reports last week serve as a reminder that propaganda
authorities also rely on methods that are more old school.

Censors recently cut the China section from The Economist magazine, online magazine Tea
Leaf Nation, which
specializes in Chinese social media, reports. Not from the web, but from the
copies on sale in Shanghai airport. With scissors. Nor is that an
isolated incident. In 2009 we reported on copies
of the National Geographic sold with pages
of a China feature glued shut. Tea Leaf
Nation shares other anecdotes gathered on social media: "I subscribe to the
Asia edition of Time. Articles on
China are torn out and issues with covers about China are just not
distributed," one says, according to Tea
Leaf Nation's translation.

In
other offline censorship news, CCTV News last week broadcast a story on
Michelangelo's David, but pixelated the statue's genitals to shield viewers from
"a negative [emotional] impact," according to Beijing-based
media blog Danwei.

Finally, China's State Administration of Radio Film and
Television, or SARFT, is stepping up regulations on "micro films," China's
audio-visual equivalent of microblogs, according to Hong Kong University-based China Media Project. The
regulations state that all online programming will be subject to pre-approval
before broadcast, although it is not clear how that would be enforced, the
project said. The media project describes the films as "features and
documentaries filmed on mobile phones and distributed to potentially mass
audiences through social media." As one online commenter pointed out, in the
project's translation: "SARFT still wants to approve [films] one at a time.
Apparently, they're not afraid of dying of exhaustion."

These apparently disparate incidents have more in common
with highly technical censorship than you might think. Take The Economist: "The issues I see in our
provincial library and local library all have the China section," one online
commentator wrote, according to Tea Leaf
Nation's translation. In other words, just as Sina is held responsible for
user content, distributors of print media interpret censorship guidelines for themselves,
with widely different results. CCTV producers make their own decisions
regarding what's appropriate to broadcast. And the new micro film regulations "explicitly
hold distributors of online video programming responsible for violations of
propaganda discipline," the China Media Project reports.

Responses from China in these articles reveal another common
thread: No one takes them too seriously. Fair enough--censors wielding glue
sticks in a digital age are more comical than terrifying. But there is an
important takeaway, nonetheless.

China's censors are not one, uniform entity. Their diversity
is one of the keys to China's continuing control of information, despite highly
engaged
communities of online activists and journalists. It's easy to think of the
Great Firewall as monolithic. The reality--a network of government employees,
companies, and individual citizens tasked with managing news and information sharing--is
more permeable, but ultimately more successful.

Madeline Earp is senior researcher for CPJ’s Asia Program. She has studied Mandarin in China and Taiwan, and graduated with a master’s in East Asian studies from Harvard. Follow her on Twitter @cpjasia and Facebook @ CPJ Asia Desk.